A website can function without any apparent bugs and yet fail to meet any of its objectives. Pages that load, a form that submits data, a menu that expands its links: everything seems in order. These superficial checks say nothing about the site’s actual ability to convert, rank, or comply with recent legal obligations. Evaluating a website requires looking in the right places, with the right criteria.
Core Web Vitals: the three metrics that determine your SEO
Google no longer just checks if a site “loads quickly.” Since the integration of the INP (Interaction to Next Paint) metric, the search engine measures the actual responsiveness of a page when a visitor clicks a button or a link. A site may display its content quickly, but respond with a noticeable delay to interactions.
Three thresholds structure this technical evaluation:
- LCP less than or equal to 2.5 seconds: the largest visible element (image, text block) must appear in less than 2.5 seconds. Beyond that, Google considers the experience degraded.
- INP less than or equal to 200 milliseconds: each user interaction (click, tap, keyboard input) must trigger a visual response in less than 200 ms. This threshold replaces the older, more lenient FID.
- CLS less than or equal to 0.1: elements on the page must not shift visually during loading. A button that “jumps” just as the visitor is about to click is exactly what CLS penalizes.
The proportion of mobile sites meeting these three criteria remains below half of the web. On desktop, just over half of sites reach the “good” level. Meeting these thresholds already places your site ahead of most of your competitors.
To know precisely how to evaluate your website on these metrics, Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool remains the free reference. It displays the Core Web Vitals based on real user data, not lab simulations.
Digital accessibility: a legal obligation, not a bonus
Have you ever tried to navigate a site by zooming the text to 200%? If the layout breaks or buttons become inaccessible, the site has an accessibility issue. This is no longer just an ethical question: it has become a regulatory constraint.
The European directive on accessibility, transposed into French law, gradually extends obligations to the private sector. E-commerce and digital service companies are concerned. Failing to assess the accessibility of your site amounts to ignoring a concrete legal risk.
What an accessibility audit checks
The French RGAA (General Reference for Improving Accessibility) sets precise criteria. An audit does not just check for the presence of alt attributes on images.
It examines keyboard-only navigation, color contrast between text and background, form readability by screen readers, and the coherence of heading structure. A site compliant with RGAA is also a site better structured for SEO, because both disciplines share the same technical foundations: clean markup, logical hierarchy, alternative content.
Ignoring accessibility during a website evaluation in 2026 means missing an entire aspect of the actual quality of a site.
Content and technical SEO: evaluating what Google really reads
The content visible to your visitors and the content read by search engines are not always the same. Well-written text that is poorly marked up can go unnoticed in search results.
The quality of page markup
Each page must have a unique title (title tag), a distinct meta description, and a coherent Hn heading structure. When two pages share the same title, Google struggles to determine which one to rank. This is a common problem on sites that have grown without an editorial strategy.
Checking the uniqueness of title tags on each page takes a few minutes with a free crawling tool and often reveals duplicates that no one suspected.
Content versus search intent
Why can a well-written page generate no traffic? Often because it answers a question that no one is asking on Google. Evaluating a site’s content is not just about judging its writing quality. It’s about ensuring that each page targets a real query, with sufficient search volume.
Quality content without a keyword strategy remains invisible. Conversely, SEO-optimized but shallow content will quickly be abandoned by visitors, degrading the behavioral signals sent to Google.
Long-term monitoring: evaluating a website is not a one-time event
A site compliant with best practices in January can drop in March. A plugin update, a server change, a partial redesign: each modification can alter performance, break an internal link, or degrade accessibility.
Regular monitoring of Core Web Vitals, keyword ranking, and the indexing status of pages is the minimum. Google Search Console alerts you for free about crawl errors, pages excluded from the index, and mobile usability issues.
An initial audit without monthly follow-up loses its value within weeks. Sites that sustainably progress in search results are those that integrate evaluation as a continuous process, not as an isolated diagnosis.
The reflex to maintain: every quarter, review the three Core Web Vitals, check for 404 errors, control for duplicate title tags, and test keyboard navigation on key pages. It’s an investment of a few hours that protects months of accumulated work.
